House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski ***

I normally like to wait a few days to write these reviews, so that I've had time to digest my thoughts. But this book is different, in many ways, and I had a lot to say almost immediately after I started reading. This book is like that - by design it makes the reader ask questions. The book's title page reads: House of Leaves, by Zampano, with introduction and notes by Johnny Truant. Normally I don't pay much attention to the title card, but right away I'm wondering - if the book is by Mark Z. Danielewski (another check of the book's spine confirmed the name), who the hell are Zampano and Johnny Truant? By itself, the fact that I have a lot of questions is a good thing. I like questions; I like art that engages me. And Danielewski has tried hard to engage the reader. Ultimately, though, many of these efforts seem somewhat silly.

It's also not a particularly terrifying book, which kind of surprised me since it's filed in the horror section of the bookstore. And the book self-referentially calls itself horrifying, while I'm sitting there reading it, not scared. I grew to care about many of the characters, though (though not all), and there is some very good stuff.

I read somewhere about the book that "it teaches you how to read it" (or something to that effect). I didn't really know what that quote meant when I first saw it, but this turns out to be pretty true. It's not a normal book, and the reader needs to follow atypical procedures to read it. This abstraction, which on its surface appears complicated, makes sense; we learn how to navigate through Danielewski's maze. But it's a bit too easy. It's too obvious. In terms of its abstraction, Danielewski didn't go far enough. If this book is meant to recreate for the reader an experience akin to the book's characters' experiences, Danielewski simply doesn't succeed - they struggle like hell and we have an easy go of it [at least in terms of navigating the text - not necessarily in terms of making all the connections amongst characters]. Of course, we're not supposed to suffer as they did, but we're supposed to find some corollary between the reading experience and the experiences of the book's characters. This doesn't happen. Abstraction isn't simply re-arranging the eyes and nose on the painting of a face, which is what Danielewski does to his prose.

Amazingly, there's a huge fan base for this book, with a number of readers online discussing details about character relationships only hinted at in the text, codes and hidden meanings, and various other minutiae. I glanced through some of the threads on a House of Leaves forum, noting some interesting ideas, clearly intended by Danielewski, that I simply didn't pick up on. And I have to imagine that was much of the point. But I didn't really have that much interest. Ultimately, the stories themselves didn't excite me enough to want to do more research about them or try to piece all the little details together. I'll compare it to David Lynch's Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive. Both of those movies ask a lot of questions, beg repeated viewings, discussion with friends, etc. The difference between those movies and House of Leaves is that their material is entrancing enough for me to want to ask those questions, while the material in House of Leaves is not. All of this would make it sound like I didn't like the book, which clearly wasn't the case since I gave it a pretty high mark at ***. I think part of it was that I was just put off by the low-level abstraction. As someone involved in the creation of abstract art, I think I have a hard time with things not done as well as I'd like. And also, the story at the heart of HOL is genuinely good. If it were just that story, it would be a very good book. The bizarre truth, though, is that the artifice surrounding that story, Danielewski's abstractions, has garnered his book such devoted fans, and they wouldn't be nearly as interested in the more straightforward story that would be much better. So by making his book worse, he's gained more fans.

click for more of my comments - includes spoilers

Quotes:
pg. 18: "He's the kind of guy who thinks sublime is something you choke on after a shot of tequila. Maybe he's right."

pg. 588: "I trust your good head keeps you from squandering too many hours in front of the television. Beware of that lazy eye, it only teaches you how to die."

pg. 166: "The epistemology of the house remains entirely commensurate with its size. After all, one always approaches the unknown with grater caution the first time around. Thus it appears far more expansive than it literally is. Knowledge of the terrain on a second visit dramatically contracts this sense of distance. Who has never gone for a walk through some unfamiliar park and felt that it was huge, only to return a second time to discover that the park is in fact much smaller than initially perceived?"

pg. 527: "Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer."
(spring 2004)

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